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Comment & Response
May 20, 2019

Dangers of Opioid Prescribing for Young Adults After Dental Procedures—Reply

Author Affiliations
  • 1Division of Hospital Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California
  • 2Division of Critical Care, Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California
  • 3Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco
  • 4Department of Pediatrics, University of California, San Francisco
  • 5Division of Gastroenterology, Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California
  • 6Genentech, South San Francisco, California
JAMA Intern Med. 2019;179(7):998. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.0213

In Reply We thank Hersh and colleagues for their comments regarding our recent investigation on dental opioid use in adolescents and young adults,1 and also for their multiple contributions in this area. We agree that most of the dental opioid prescriptions documented in our study were likely to come from oral surgeons who possess either doctor of dental medicine or doctor of dental surgery degrees and perform the vast majority of third molar extractions, the procedure most likely to be driving the high frequency of opioid prescriptions. We opted to include general surgeon–oral/maxillofacial specialists as a health care provider category (composing 2.4% of first prescribers of opioids) to capture all health care provider types that might be performing dental procedures, but we acknowledge that oral surgeons generally fall into the doctor of dental medicine/doctor of dental surgery category.

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